D’Souza begins his book thus:
In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. “¦ In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.
Also from this idiotic book by D’Souza:
Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage””some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.
I realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made before. But it is a neglected aspect of the 9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current controversy over the “˜war against terrorism.” “¦ I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to numerous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and Democrats.
And the Jihad — Col. Ojukwu’s own word — against the Nigerian Christians, that led to the 1967-1969 Biafran War — was caused by what “cultural left” among the Ibo? Doesn’t Dinesh D’Souza know that the most straitlaced and conservative Anglicans in the world are the black African Anglicans?
And what “cultural left” is on display among the Buddhist monks and schoolteachers of southern Thailand, being killed by the thousands? Have they been handing out Gramsci and Susan Sontag, and showing videos of Harvey Fierstein in those Thai one-room schoolhouses and temples? Is that what gets the Muslims into such a murderous mood?
And those Hindus murdered or driven out of Bangladesh, of Pakistan, of Kashmir — what is that “cultural left” they must, in the vision of D’Souza, have been part of? How many subscriptions to the New Left Review go to Hindu homes in Dacca or Rawalpindi? How many secret sympathizers with that “cultural left” that is such an enemy of Islam — you know, people like Arundhati Roy, or Ken Livingstone, well-known to send Muslims into a fury?
What a total ass this Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution turns out to be. How can a place that once had Sidney Hook and Robert Conquest as fellows continue to subsidize and permit to sully its walks someone at the level of Dinesh D’Souza, spouting such nonsense, and dangerous nonsense?
The Hoover Institution is a repository for many things, but above all other things, for material on the Russian Revolution, the emigration, and Soviet Russia. It is maintained by a smooth Development Office that obtains funds from so-called conservative contributors and their foundations. But the Cold War is no more, and the main totalitarian threat today comes from Islam, a belief-system that is naturally collectivist. It includes both a Complete Regulation of Life a Total Explanation of the Universe, and is much more than a religion, but a Way that appeals to the primitive and the primitivizing, those who seek simple answers to the universe — as Dinesh D’Souza does.
From the Dartmouth Review days on, he has not been a thinker, but a figure in opposition to some perceived “leftist” threat or piety. Now he has gone over the edge, still thinking that Islam, the true, good, Islam that we all know — don’t we? — is there, the Islam that is “conservative” only in the sense of not admitting change for a millennium or so, of being rigid and fixated on seventh-century Arabia and on a few biographers and jurisconsults and muhaddithin, all of whom appeared within the first few hundred years of Islam and made immutable and therefore permanent doctrines, including that which was always in Islam, that division between Believer and Infidel, and between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, about which Dinesh D’Souza appears to know so very little.